1916
A Global History
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
The mud-filled, blood-soaked trenches of the Low Countries and North-Eastern Europe were essential battlegrounds during the First World War, but the war reached many other corners of the globe, and events elsewhere significantly affected its course.
Covering the twelve months of 1916, eminent historian Keith Jeffery uses twelve moments from a range of locations and shows how they reverberated around the world. As well as discussing better-known battles such as Gallipoli, Verdun and the Somme, Jeffery examines Dublin, for the Easter Rising, East Africa, the Italian front, Central Asia and Russia, where the killing of Rasputin exposed the internal political weakness of the country's empire. And, in charting a wide range of wartime experience, he studies the 'intelligence war', naval engagements at Jutland and elsewhere, as well as the political consequences that ensued from the momentous US presidential election.
Using an extraordinary range of military, social and cultural sources, and relating the individual experiences on the ground to wider developments, these are the stories lost to history, the conflicts that spread beyond the sphere of Europe and the moments that transformed the war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jeffery (MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909 1949), of Queen's University Belfast, shifts the focus of the Great War's pivotal year, 1916, away from the conventional milieu of the Western Front, instead depicting the global dimensions of the metastasizing conflict. Jeffery moves from region to region, event to event, to demonstrate "the astonishing range, variety, and interconnectedness of the wartime experience." Interconnectedness is a crucial point for him; the human element is his focus. Jeffery establishes the integration of "local loyalties, differences, and antagonisms" into the framework of a worldwide crisis of legitimacy. The war stressed systems on one hand and loyalties on the other. By 1916 the able-bodied adults of whole populations were being mobilized for a conflict with seemingly inexhaustible demands, yet no apparent end was in sight. Taxes, supply shortages, conscription, and casualties generated and exacerbated national, ethnic, social, and economic fault lines from the British Isles to Asian Russia. Yet from state and public perspectives alike, the efforts and sacrifices legitimated violent repression of domestic dissent and extinguished halfhearted efforts to secure a compromise peace. "Mobilizing ideologies in support of war aims" sustained the conflict but generated "bitter antagonisms and unrealized ambitions" whose present-day traces, Jeffery concludes, remain surprisingly vital.
